Jack Bushmaker’s 1947 Chevrolet Coupe, which became famous as the Purple Burp, seen in its prime.
At the shoulder of a Wyoming county road, a stately cottonwood stands. In its time, this grayed monarch has seen cavalry and Indians; horsemen and homesteaders; dudes, dreamers, and sight-seers. Daily viewed but seldom noticed in the passing, this old tree carries a special story of its own. A huge scar mars its roadside bark, and therein lies the tale of the Purple Burp.
Larry Pointer
The stately cottonwood tree, still standing outside Sheridan, Wyoming.
The 1950s were precious, special times, the postwar rosy bubble of the American Dream. And in the nation’s midland empire, Sheridan, Wyoming, was living large. The teen scene was jukebox, sock hop moving theater. California dreaming rebels without a clue, dragging Main in a slow promenade. KOMA on the radio. Cars and kids throbbing to the primal beat of rock ’n’ roll. Seeing and being seen.
And always, for the boys, it was all about the girls. “Chantilly lace, a pretty face, hair falling down. …” Just like the Big Bopper called it. Ooooh, baby!
Among those daughters’ fathers, their worst nightmares were the Cool Cats: flat-tops and duck-tails, low-riding jeans with turned-up cuffs, a cigarette pack tucked high in a white T-shirt sleeve. And the baddest cats of all were the Conquistadors.
They were Slim, Frenchy and Cass, Bob, Schatzy, Tank and Mo. The Conquistadors were a Car Club. Not just any car club, either. They were a National Hot Rod Association Charter Car Club. Like the chivalrous conquistadors of old in the livery of their individuality, they let their “rides” speak for them. For Jack “Bushy” Bushmaker, who would become a club president, this ride was the Purple Burp.
Yes, Purple Burp was a car. It had started out life in an ordinary way, a Detroit assembly line postwar product from prewar tooling, a 1947 Chevrolet coupe. But this one was not destined to be just any car. Purple Burp was to become a hand-crafted piece of rolling sculpture, a custom car.
One day when Jack rolled up to the curb in his stripped-down ’32 Chevy roadster, he spied the ’47 sitting in his folks’ garage. It could be his, his dad told him, if he could come up with the $750 purchase price. (Dad possibly had clouds of worry over his head in dark thoughts of the “hot rod” now sitting at the curb.)
Done! Jack had after-school jobs, and the ’47 was soon his. He had visions of cool custom cars dancing in his head. Study hall hours of poring over what were known as “little pages”—Honk!, Hot Rod, Car Craft, and Rod & Custom magazines—cleverly tucked inside his school books had sparked a passion. Conquistador Jack Bushmaker was going to have the most radical custom car the girls had ever seen.
As with the knights of old, bragging rights started with the power and performance of their “rides.” Girls mostly couldn’t care less, but the hormone-fueled adrenalin rush of derring-do was a big driver in the car culture. It wasn’t long until Jack blew the engine on the ’47. The 216-cubic-inch Chevy six-banger had just enough low end torque to exceed caution off the line, but as the flathead V8 Fords caught up to out-wind them on the top end, those poured-lead Chevrolet babbit bearings soon hammered a round crankshaft flat.
When that car came to life, the rumble out of those pipes was awesome. I can still hear that car “back-rap” cackle all the way down high school hill in second gear. There is nothing like the sound of a six-cylinder car with twice-pipes. And the back-rap is the BEST!
Surely all the girls walking home were impressed. They didn’t have cell phones then to distract them.
Somewhere along the line, the ’47 Chevy coupe had been repainted in a robin’s-egg blue popular shortly after the war. But Jack’s car soon would stand out, with patches of deep-red oxide primer where minor bodywork had begun. The trunk handle was removed and the deck lid smoothed. Chrome trim was removed from the hood.
Along the way, the car was lowered four inches all around. Then, for that “speedboat stance” and added stability, four 30-pound bars, or “pigs,” of printers’ lead from the Sheridan Press were bolted to the trunk floor.
Then Jack made a bold move. With his design plans in hand, he went to the local Ford dealership. An estimate was drawn up for the changes he proposed: $700, to do it all. And then this high-schooler made a nervy request: Could he make payments? It was a risky proposal. Those under 18 could not be held responsible for their debts. But Jack had a job at the newspaper, and hadn’t he already paid off his father? Mr. Cook took the gamble and authorized work to begin.
Another view of the Purple Burp.
At the Cook Ford Body Shop, work commenced in earnest on Jack’s ambitious plan. A top chop was tackled by shop foreman Rocky Pedulla and Hank Sullivan, the World War II Navy vet with the rolling sailor’s gait. As evidenced by the narrow “mail slot” rear window, fully seven inches were removed, front and rear, to lower the lid. Overall, it gave Jack that “don’t mess with me” sinister look he was striving for.
Unique to this car, and way ahead of its time in the art of customizing, was the forward slant of the B pillars at the rear of the door windows. From a side view, this change especially gave the coupe a forward motion flair to accentuate its “speed-boat” stance. It is a safe bet that this was the first and last top chop performed by Pedulla and Sullivan. The sail panels especially gave them fits, but the smooth, sweeping contours they achieved speak volumes for their creative sense of style.
Another aspect of forward-looking design was evident in the side view of that remarkable custom car. There were no fender skirts to cover the rear wheels, as with the traditional customs of old. The year 1955 saw major design changes in postwar Detroit styling, and not the least of these was the opening up of the rear fenders as evidenced in the sporty Chevrolet Corvette and Nomad, and those Chrysler and DeSoto “Hemi” muscle cars. Performance was selling cars, and nothing said “speed” quite like it.
The 1955 styling cues from Chevrolet were also incorporated by Jack in his unprecedented incorporation of the 1955 Chevrolet flat “egg-crate” grille into the front of the ’47. To make this a fit, Pedulla and Sullivan “bobbed” the car’s hood, to bring it into a more flat surround for the grille. It was a brilliant innovation. Again, making the design all his own, Jack had all of the vertical teeth of the grille removed, except for the center three.
The stock headlight rims were welded integral to the fender, and the seams “frenched,” leaded-in smoothly. This was “old-school” bodywork; no “bondo” was used, only time-tested lead. To complete the frontal transformation, a 1955 Ford bumper was added.
Moving to the back, the rear fenders also were welded to the body panels and the seam leaded smooth. The stock tail lights were mounted in a lower, sexier location and smoothly frenched in. To the shaved deck lid, a recess was added for placement of the license plate. Completing the program around back, a ’49 Ford bumper was mounted upside-down, and recessed slightly into the rear bodywork. A short seven months after these extensive changes were begun, Jack’s restyled custom car was ready for paint.
Actually, it wasn’t purple. This Conquistador’s steed was regally cloaked in a lacquer conservatively named Dawn Grey by the color stylists of the Cadillac Division of General Motors for their 1956 models. In direct sunlight this custom took on a hint of an orchid tint. At night, it would pick up hues from streetlights and the neon signs of the downtown businesses along Main Street. Parked behind the Sheridan Press newspaper building, this color play caught the eye of a fellow worker, and Jack’s beautiful custom car was dubbed the Purple Burp.
In this neck of the woods, Jack’s radically restyled car was the best designed custom car ever seen, a seminal marvel to all who “got it.” It never made it into a major car show; never was published in Rod & Custom, or in any of the “little pages” car magazines of the day. Its fame was not widespread. Nor was it destined to decorate Sheridan’s Main drag for long.
It was, appropriately enough, the night of Friday the 13th. Jack was cruising Main with his friend Marlin Sene. They crossed paths with a pair of guys from Billings who really dug Jack’s ride. The Billings boys parked their car on Courthouse Hill at the south end of the nightly promenade and climbed into the back seat of the chopped Chevy coupe.
Just to show the visitors what that GMC engine could do, they headed west, onto the country road. Through the twisting turns, Jack had the car wound pretty tight and, with double shock absorbers all around, cornering like a cougar. Then, in an instant, everything went horribly wrong.
A closeup view of the tree, its bark still missing 60 years later.
The little coupe lost traction, went into a skid and shot over the pavement edge. Jack fought the wheel, trying to bring the slide under control. It was no use. In a heartbeat, the beautiful car was clipping over roadside saplings to the sickening sound of crumpling sheet metal. The huge old cottonwood loomed up in front of them. Jack wrenched the wheel; they struck the tree only fractions shy of dead head-on. Marlin pitched forward into the dashboard. Jack was slammed under the steering wheel. Then there was silence, save for the hissing steam rising from the ruptured radiator.
A woman was first onto the scene. Marlin was bleeding profusely, four front teeth gone, his mouth lacerated. Jack was nearly under the dash. The boys from Billings were scrambling to extricate themselves from the wreck. The woman began to lecture them, shaking her finger at Jack. “Please,” he begged her, “go for help!”
Help came. Officer Verne Eisenman of the Highway Patrol. An ambulance. Andy Grotz from Central Garage with his wrecker truck. Marlin Sene, in addition to the subtraction of his front teeth, had a broken collarbone. The Billings guys were dropped off at their car on Main Street, to boogie for safer environs in Montana.
Jack thought he’d come out of it all OK. But Officer Eisenman had some counseling to give this very lucky Conquistador. The patrolman drew out his notebook.
“He showed me a page where he had written down the names of the guys who he figured would be wrecking their cars or worse. Harry Larsen was at the top. I was third down on the list.”
Harry “Tank” Larsen was another charter member of the Conquistadors.
While Eisenman was offering Jack intimations of his mortality, Andy Grotz dragged Jack’s car back to town. A procession slowly rolled by to gape aghast at the wrenched wreck dangling from the mast. Car to car, gossip genesis loosed gospel exodus: “Did you see that?” “How could anyone…” “Why, nobody could survive that… .” By the time the Billings boys scurried out of town past the crowd gathered at Hersh’s Drive-In, scuttlebutt was solemn certainty: “Jack Bushmaker was killed in a car wreck!” “And on Friday the 13th.”
Later that evening when Jack showed up at Hersh’s, a wake over the coffee cups fell away at the sight of such a lively apparition. But then on Monday he too went to the doctor, to discover he also had a broken collarbone, along with a hairline leg fracture. That night he went bowling anyway, “And I bowled the best score I ever bowled in my entire life!”
The wrecked Purple Burp is towed back into town after the accident.
In the ensuing years, Jack would move on, marry his Colleen, and raise a family in Coos Bay, Oregon. There he became an officer of the law and would serve on the local school board. He’s still a car guy. In his garage are two painstakingly restored Oldsmobile 442s. His driver is a jet black 1949 Chevrolet pickup. And, yes, it is mildly customized.
The Purple Burp is no more, save for a few precious black-and-white Kodak images. The motor became a donor for the Central Garage boom truck. The crushed body was discarded with other hulks in a depression outside town. An ignoble ending for beauty so brief.
But that cottonwood monarch still stands, its bark deeply scored. In the play of light, if you look just right, you can catch a hint of an orchid tint. Could it be, just perhaps, Dawn Grey?
Larry Pointer said he has “had a Forrest Gump path through life. More schools than I can count on one hand. Sixteen moves. Half that many career changes. I trained in genetics and information management. Taught Life Sciences for 11 years. Coached college rodeo. Became a federal civil servant, first with the Bureau of Land Management, and finally with the National Park Service. Yosemite National Park, where I was chief of natural and cultural resources, was wonderful. I have written half a dozen books on Western subject matter: Western art, Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, and rodeo history. Glad I never quit my day job. I’m retired now, but a Conquistadors Car Club member for life. It’s incurable.”
